@Entropy “Sam Walton made ALOT of people’s lives better by lowering their cost of living.”
He also annihilated a lot of good jobs, destroyed value, abused his company’s size in monopolistic and monopsonistic ways, received sweetheart deals from local governments, accelerated outsourcing jobs to the third world, created negative externalities on the US taxpayer, the planet’s environment and carved a chunk out of the middle class. See this: Walmart: The High Cost Of Low Prices.
“But what about his kids? They’re just inheriting right? They don’t ‘deserve’ that money! Except, this is an upside-down way to look at it.”
Not really upside down at all. The reason capitalism works is because it mimics nature’s survival of the fittest mechanism, not because of an inherited “divine right” feudal economic model. Sam can pass on good education and some of his wealth to his kids, but it doesn’t help anyone (except the kids) if they don’t then have to use those advantages to earn their own fortunes through competition. Your neofeudal approach to capitalism is the upside-down view.
The idea that vulture capitalists are inherently beneficial is also upside down. You’re assuming they’re beneficial and then using that to justify that they’re creating value. Companies like that destroy value all of the time, same with mergers and acquisitions that end up leading nowhere. When you have billionaires, and a system that allows politicians to be bribed, the government starts undoing the oversight that regulates markets to prevent things like banks investing their customer’s holdings, or allowing mergers, or refusing to pursue anti-labor practices, or carving out exceptions to prevent unions from striking. And then when those bad bets lead to catastrophic losses, then they get bailouts from the taxpayers because they’re too big to fail. Give me a break…
I think you really ought to give Marx a read. Communism is a critique of the failures of capitalism. There are successful companies employing this model. Having democracy in the workplace would solve many of the problems we see in our system.